See all those little Samsung squares? That's NAND flash memory, 80 gigabytes worth on
Fusion-io's ioDrive. Tweaktown got an exclusive look at the PCIe storage card and came away mightily impressed by its "near nonexistent latency." It's faster than the best SATA II SSD or fastest 15,000RPM drive loaded in an 8 drive RAID config. Put simply, it's the fastest storage device they've ever tested. Tweaktown was so impressed that they proclaim, "Fusion-io has raised the bar so high that once adopted, traditional solutions will be considered legacy products." Mind you, this is enterprise class storage designed for data center servers requiring ultra-fast IO. Still, the only thing preventing you from installing it inside your own 64-bit OS (only) gaming rig is the price: the 80GB ioDrive lists for about $3,000 on up to $14,400 for the 320GB model. Yeah, expensive, but not for your CIO. Eveyone else will have to wait for the consumer model said to be in the works. Hit the read link for all the benchmarks.
posted December 11th 2008 5:30AM
I've never seen this. Is the data transfer done over PCIx16 or do you plug a sata cable in somewhere?
Looks to me like PCI-E x4. Its communicating with the motherboard via PCI-E, not SATA.
The interface shouldn't be far from an independent RAID card. PCI-E is really fast and I seriously can't see any large capacity storage solution hitting PCI-E 16X in say, the next five years. Unless they invent fusion packs and 120GB RAM stick.
Anyway, I'll be damned.
It was like cool, I'm interested...until i seen the price.
If you actually need that kind of performance, I am not sure price is a big issue...
See, this is what I hate about the PC gaming industry these days. I bet someone at Rockstar Games is expecting us to cough up $3k for one of these so we can play GTA IV (which btw should be named GTA VI) at max graphics settings and without the ridiculously long load times.
@E71
It shouldn't be named GTA VI.. an I'll tell you why!
Basically Vice City & San Andreas are more like stand alone expansion packs to GTA3, the first GTA had 3 islands, right?
Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City.
GTA IV is basically GTA3.. just more flashy.. so no doubt they'll be doing Vice City and San Andreas all over again.
As for this storage? I hope to god the price is in more of a reasonable range once we consumers get our grubby mits on it.
@E71: You don't HAVE to play GTA IV at max settings. And even if you do, you don't need to spend $3k on a system to do it, $2k will do just fine!
@Akio
I'm afraid that doesn't make sense. Vice City and San Andreas were both too substantial to be called expansion packs. If they were released as part of GTA3 or as actual expansion packs (i.e. required GTA3 to run) then yes it would make sense to call this latest one GTA4.
Anyway, it all looks messy to me... they should just stick to a simple numbering system.
The idea of having a re-designed Vice City does excite me though as that one was definitely my favorite. \m/
@Backlin:
Why not? I have a Core 2 Extreme QX9650, 8GB DDR3, HD4870 1GB and a Velociraptor... however the frame rate is terrible, it doesn't let me turn viewing distance up without turning down texture/render quality and thus making everything blurry and load times are a bitch. There was one cut-scene I've seen so far that had several 15-30 second loading screens in it.
Sure my specs aren't the highest of today but are definitely in the upper range and I think it's reasonable to expect to be able to play at max settings with a decent frame rate. They should stop making games over-demanding and calling it "settings for future hardware". -- that's some lame excuse they use for not optimizing the code.
Meh, not that bad after you've seen the price of SSD's.
Only 3k each? I'll take two of them for Raid-0 please!
I don't think you can RAID this unless you find a RAID card that has PCI-E (x4 at that) slots or drives that are otherwise not attached to the RAID card.
Software RAID will work, though.
Provided that enterprises know how to cache things into cheap RAM, does the price make up for its 3% real life performance increase?
But you'll need to have 80Gb of memory if you need to cache this much data.
@skyhooks: For $2649 you get 80 gigabytes of DDR2 667mhz FB-dimm at newegg. That gives you a peak bandwidth of 5333 MB/s. You can get off-the-shelf servers with 128GB of RAM. For enterprise vendors 16.8 million terabytes is the (theoretical) limit.
In high I/O-environments, RAM is still king.
This is a promising product and similar products will make an impact once the price drops.
Yes but all the data in your RAM would be lost if the power goes out.
which we all know that they do not...
If you have that much transient data to cache, then sure, use RAM. With a Java server side software, xxGB of cache (on 64bit VM) means longer garbage collection. I'm sure there are associated memory management issues in other languages with that much ram being used. Also if you want your data stored after a powerdown, you need persistence. $3k for 80Gb is not expensive, it is cheap! Consider it will cost you far more than $3k just to buy a suitable server that can hold that much ram plus the RAM plus the coder's salary to write the new caching code.
This thing looks ideal for high database demand, high transaction systems. Or super demanding movie editing or some sort.
@linuxamp
You don't have disk drives instead of RAM cache today because you need your data in case of power failure. For that you have UPS's and clusters/fail overs. You have it on disk drives because having it on RAM is prohibited by cost vs need. Dumping your RAM to a backed up drive is close to free.
If your servers go down due to the UPS's fail the loss of 15 minutes worth of data is the least of your problems. Getting your server powered back up is.
I am sure there are scenarios where this product has a purpose, but it's a niche.
Does that 3% assume you make very few writes, perhaps based on some kind of workload average? (We have our database mostly in RAM - the server has 16GB at present, being upgraded - but do quite a lot of writes. That said I am not remotely suggesting we need this product...)
@Ryback
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134695 x 80 = 4,599.20
@catsceo. You can of course choose to buy the more expensive ram or you opt for this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134414
me wants!
where did you read that its only 3% faster lpppppl?
Matt, this plugs into your pci-e 2.0 port, no sata cables needed, its a standalone card, its a harddrive but incredibly fast.
this was announced 6 months or so ago but there werent xp drivers then i dont think, hopefully it'll be great, shame about the price.
Review: http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1683/exclusive_look_at_fusion_io_iodrive_pcie_solid_state/index.html
hdtune benchmarks:
455mb/s read
332mb/s write
0.05ms seek time
wipes the floor with ssd's!!!
I think he means 3% over caching in RAM. This clearly ourperforms other hard drives.
Server wise though i think it's still ram caching for the win price to performance wise.
Nice. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
@sam
Just a heads up. Pretty obvious, since the article is attached, but mb = Mbit = 1/8 of a MByte.. So saying 455mb/s really means 56MB/sec, while 332mb/s means 42MB/s. Just a heads up. Sucks that capitalization actually means something on occasion =P
@Precurse: No, it says MB and it means MB.
That test (on page 6) compares the ioDrive to an 8-drive RAID array of 15k rpm disks on sequential reads and writes. In my own testing, I was able to get 700MB/s on sequential reads on the ioDrive.
Cheaper option http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Storage/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2180
No, this is not even close, in terms of performance. You're still limited by the SATA bus, as it only uses PCI for power, not data transfer.
Personally $3,000 for that kind of performance is really cheap, especially upon it's introduction to the market.
Drop the price 10 times and I'll get one :)
adam, the gigabyte is crap.
Actually the price wouldn't be so bad if it were truly enterprise-class, but it doesn't look like it is constructed like an enterprise-class piece of equipment. So yeah, it's overpriced.
enterprise-price-class, because 8k is too high even for many companies.
I love that someone feels like they can simply look at something and determine that it's "enterprise class"
This card reminds me old VESA video card with 1Mb of memory :)
Finally a use for that extra PCIe slot.
i am with you BobTurbo
Is it just me or does that look like a SAS Internal connector on the front and back by the bracket? The companies web-site mentions nothing about it, or does the review?
I am not sure what you are refering to. The front panel just has a couple of LEDs. The board itself is actually two boards connected together with the connector at the front which connects the PCIe signals. These boards are held together with the plastic bracket at the end and the metal cover at the front. The lower board with the PCIe edge connector seems to just have the power converters on it, with the meat on the second card. I guess this lets them swap flash cards.
I held one of these devices in my hands yesterday evening looking at all of this.
Something seems wrong with the pricing model. 80GB for $3000 X 4 = 320GB and $12,000 respectively. However, the 320GB model is $14,400. How much sense does that make, it costs $2,400 more to use one controller card instead of 4 for the same amount of storage? I'm sure you pay a bit more for higher density chips to fit 320GB on one board, but its one board not 4 with lower density chips.
Board price is nothing compared to the Chip price. They literally pay pennies per board in mass production. Those chips on the other hand are probably in the $100's per for the low density ones even in 10K+ Volumes.
@ Shyam D - If thats the case then why do SSD having the same volume and using the same NAND chips cost SIGNIFICANTLY less? I think they are just taking advantage of the early adopters like most tech manufacturers do....
Even stranger, the 320GB model uses MLC chips while the 80GB and 160GB models use SLC chips. Even less reason for the 80GB model to be cheaper per GB then the 320GB model.
I think it is bit too pricy for an 80 gig SATA II. The average consumers would not be able afford it and would probably for the cheaper and reliable storage rather than paying so much for the chip price.
PCI-E would seem to be the way to go once SSD start maxing out SATA.
Multiple solid state chips make as much sense in the addon card form factor as the do in the traditional 2.5/3.5" box form.
Maybe even a very very fast boot/system drive built into the motherboard could become the norm once price come down enough.
In the words of the great philosopher Hilton, "That's hot."
Saw this at DVNation. Pretty good stuff.
About time someone reviewed it... this thing was announced over a year ago.